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Time to drop Facebook

I signed up for Facebook a couple of years ago, because I was working on a social-network company. I scarcely use it—LJ is better—and their latest assault on their users' privacy has convinced me I need to delete my account...assuming that's possible.

Honestly, while I can understand the feeling, the truth is that anyone who has ever really associated Facebook and privacy hasn't been paying attention. I've done enough work on their platform to be pretty clear that their privacy controls have always been *very* weak. In particular, it's generally been utterly coarse-grained: as soon as you access an application and give it permission, it knows *everything* about you.

(In the past, they've provided contractual limits on retention of that data, but I gather those limits have just been dropped. I think that's actually the right decision: the rules were making life difficult for many well-behaved apps, and didn't do much to prevent the bad guys from misusing data.)

So basically, I'm having a lot of trouble getting exercised about any of this, because as far as I can tell, not much has actually changed. FB's privacy controls have always been weak, and they're still weak. The sad truth is, most people don't care in the slightest...

not much has actually changed. FB's privacy controls have always been weak, and they're still weak.

Maybe, yeah. What happened here, though, is that they unilaterally made them weaker without, say, sending out email telling us so. I was able to turn off the new holes—and that's all I did at first—but I don't want to have to keep doing that, over and over, every time they introduce new problems in a service I don't really care about.

I think it's useful in terms of contacts finding me, but I really wish it had better management tools. Really really wish hard.

For example, I'd like to wipe my Status updates -- nobody cares about stuff more than a week old no matter how much they love me, but in order to do that, I need to delete every single f'ing one by hand. I googled. There is no other solution.

I don't put private stuff on there, so I'm not too concerned otherwise.